Not all who wander are lost: wanderlust as a psychological driver of international mobility and migration

人类的流动性从来没有像今天这样大。截至2013年，中国有400多万留学生--预计到2025年，这一数字将增至700万。根据有限的关于这种流动的心理基础的科学文献，这些学生中的大多数既不是被经济或政治力量赶出自己的国家，也不主要是出于战略职业决定、简历提升或学术考虑。然而，在缺乏这些因素的情况下，尚不清楚上述流动的主要推动力是什么。为了回答这个问题，我提议引入一个迄今被忽视的心理学概念：旅游欲。因此，我将流浪癖概念化为一种带有情绪状态成分的基本人格特征，它需要一种强烈的动机向外驱动力，并以更高的意向和实际流动性表现出来。通过三个工作包，我的博士致力于(1)开发一个心理测量学上合理的、经过广泛验证的量化漫游欲望测量工具，(2)阐明漫游欲望作为学生流动性驱动力的动机，并将其功能和潜在过程与动机心理学中的突出框架联系起来，如饱和循环和动机可塑性原理，(3)通过工具变量分析在北美大规模样本中追溯漫游欲望的历史起源，并将它们与当代经济、政治和社会结果联系起来。

Humankind has never been more mobile than today. As of 2013 there are more than 4 million students studying abroad - a figure which is expected to rise to 7 million by 2025. According to the limited scientific literature on the psychological underpinnings of such mobility, the majority of these students are neither pushed out of their countries by economic or political forces, nor primarily motivated by strategic career decisions, CV enhancement or academic considerations. However, in the absence of these factors, it is unclear what the main impetus of said mobility is. To answer that question, I propose the introduction of a hitherto overlooked psychological construct: wanderlust. Thereby, I conceptualise wanderlust as a basic personality trait with an emotional state component, that entails a strong motivational outward drive and manifests itself in elevated intended and actual mobility. Across three working packages my PhD sets out to (1)develop a psychometrically sound, extensively validated quantitive wanderlust measure, (2) elucidate the motivational force of wanderlust as a driver of student mobility and link its functioning and underlying processes to prominent frameworks in motivation psychology, such as the satiation cycle and the principle of motivational plasticity, (3) trace back the historical origins of wanderlust in a North American large-scale sample via instrumental variable analysis and relate them to contemporary economic, political and social outcomes.